[Distutils] How to make easy_install handle platlibs?

[P.J. Eby]

At 08:53 PM 4/10/2009 -0700, Buck wrote:
>I see the kernel version and architecture, but this is insufficient;
>RedHat 4 and RedHat 5 both use a 2.6 kernel, but the difference in
>provided libraries are sufficient to make many (most?) "impure"
>libraries stop working ( numpy, python-ldap, and hashlib for
>examples).
>
>easy_install apparently knows when packages are platform-dependant,
>and the necessary directory is sys.exec_prefix (or maybe better:
>distutils.sysconfig.get_python_lib(plat_specific=1) ), so this seems
>like an easy change. Would a patch be accepted?

It would be a pretty major patch, since the distutils logic that's 
used for determining the installation directory is applied long 
before easy_install even knows what it's installing (and therefore, 
whether it's platform dependent).

It would probably be a lot easier to improve the platform string 
generation and comparison logic, as has been done for OS X.